Excerpt from “Eggs Over Dead” by Wendall Thomas
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| Photo by Wendall Thomas |
The restaurant reeks of kale chips and the phone is already
ringing.
It's a customer frantic to know if we have his gold teeth.
After searching the lost and found box and register, I finally locate the
crescent of gold Chiclets swept under the bar, entwined in a tuft of
"emotional support dog" hair. I shake them off and put them in a
take-out bag for pick-up.
I'm filling the artisanal salts when I hear a mad click
click click on the glass door. Outside, a lanky forty year old, still dressed
in his mid-life clubbing clothes, waves and points to his mouth. I let him in
and hand him the bag.
"Thought I was gonna have to call my jeweler in Jersey.
I owe you one."
Literally one, I guess. He hands me a dollar bill. He takes
the glittering brace out of the bag and pops it straight in. If he’d given me a
twenty, I might have told him he should rinse it first.
I check the clock. It's seven minutes to eight and a few
regulars are already hovering outside. I take my last chance to sneak out into
the alley for a smoke. I look down the street of one bedroom pseudo Spanish,
Deco, and Tudor bungalows, all listing for well over a million, and strike a
match.
Bang. Bang.
The Rochelle Staab Questions asked of Wendall Thomas:
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Photo of Wendall Thomas
by Stella Mulroney
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What is
the weirdest thing that ever happened to you in Los Angeles?
The weirdest (and maybe the best)
thing that ever happened to me here was seeing Stevie Wonder in the Radio Shack
at Highland and Wilshire. I think that kind of thing only happens in LA.
Do you
have a yet-to-be realized L.A. dream?
To live in a quiet 20’s duplex.
Why write
short stories? Why write at all? What's in it for you?
Some ideas aren’t big enough to be
novels, but they are still interesting enough to be told. I also like the challenge, because there’s nowhere
to hide in a short story.
What is
the biggest challenge in writing to theme?
I think there’s always the chance that
you’ll be heavy-handed or force the characters to do something they wouldn’t
actually do.
Are the
characters in your story based on you or people you know/met?
The “Thursday Guy” is an amalgam of
a few producers I’ve encountered over the years and the restaurant patrons have
elements that I’ve observed over twenty-five years of writing in restaurants.
Los
Angeles is a patchwork quilt of different neighborhoods. Why did you pick the
area you used for your story, and how did the neighborhood influence your
writing?
It’s actually my neighborhood, which
has become increasingly “hipsterized” and entitled in the last five years. This
makes long term residents like myself feel old, irrelevant, and irritated. That
seemed the right setting for the tone of the story.
Are there
scenes in your story based on real life—yours, hearsay, or a news story you
read?
As noted above. A producer actually
did point a remote at me and say “Okay, go” in a meeting once.
What came
first, the character or the plot?
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In this case, the plot. I like the idea
that someone didn’t show up for a breakfast meeting because they’d been
murdered.
While
you're writing: music (what kind?), dead silence, or…?
Usually music. The music depends on
what I’m writing. For this story, Warren Zevon/Tom Waits.
Favorite
writing quote—yours or from someone else…
From Flannery O’Connor: “Don’t be
subtle until the fourth page.”
Your
writing ritual begins with…
Coffee.
About Wendall Thomas:
Wendall Thomas teaches in the Graduate Film School at UCLA,
lectures internationally on screenwriting, and has worked as an entertainment
reporter, script consultant, and film and television writer. Her short fiction
has appeared in the crime anthologies Ladies
Night (2015) and Last Resort
(2017) and her first novel, Lost Luggage,
will be published in October by Poisoned Pen Press.
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